My brother and I love Ancient Aliens. We derive that same strange joy out of watching the show that we do from watching movies like Housefull and Singham with like-minded company.

While I do believe aliens exist, I do not like the narrow or no definition of ‘alien’ the show seems to suggest. They never really specify who or what they imply by the term. Sometimes, the aliens are angels. Sometimes, the Hindu gods are aliens. Sometimes, some of the prophets are aliens. Though I do not recall seeing it in an episode, I am sure some of our long-gone creatures must have been branded aliens too, or perhaps their going-away had something to do with aliens.

Always, the show talks of these entities from somewhere away from the three-dimensional earth, that have come to our planet, who the ancient people often mistook as Gods or their agents. Or these entities helped us build the pyramids and the Angkor Wat. The explanation of all historic mysteries is ‘aliens.’ They might as well be saying ‘because we don’t know the explanation, it must be the aliens,’ like this meme so aptly illustrates. I feel they equate ‘can’t be explained with all the known science and facts’ with ‘aliens.’

It is difficult to explain the unknown with the little-known, specially when ‘known’ isn’t as quantifiable as it parades itself.

An occasional episode here and there does provide food for thought, and one such idea had to do with Leonardo da Vinci, the famous Renaissance painter whose work is so familiar with all.

Imagine my excitement, when the opening segment of the show suggested that his paintings contained aliens and UFOs. Load of stuff to do with him being a messenger of aliens and it was they who inspired him to sketch out all those inventions we today take for granted. In the commercial break, I tried hard to remember whether I ever noticed these aliens before. Except that the Mona Lisa has a kind of odd face and that famous enigmatic smile, I couldn’t think of any other. Then just when I was about to place that episode into Rohit Shetty category, the second segment began. That is where they started mirror-imaging those paintings and then superimposing these mirror-images. Before my eyes, the screen was showing how Virgin of the Rocks became an archetypal alien. Then there was The Madonna with Saint Giovannino, and no way could the Unidentified Flying Object in it be hastily dismissed as a cloud or the moon (a moon isn’t ever a grey hexagon with yellow streaks emerging from it, is it?).

To summarize, about half a dozen paintings of the master could be superimposed on their own mirror-images to form what were obviously portraits of, well, aliens; and some paintings depicted UFOs without even having the need to mirror-image them or anything.

After my brain was bamboozled completely, I realized that I could see this for myself. Yes, I had that much time and curiosity. But to be fair, in the spirit of science and statistics, I also decided to do the mirror-bit with another Renaissance painter’s works, just to see whether the appearance of aliens had something to do with the style and approach towards painting back then. And also to see if every well-composed painting would result in a symmetry that bears likeness to a human-face that could be mistaken for… you guessed it right, an alien.

I am not sure whether I did exactly what the show did, but here are some of the edits anyway:

Virgin of the Rocks

Lady with an Ermine

The Madonna of the YarnwinderA detail from The Annunciation

Here are two of Raphael’s:The Nymph GalateaDetail from The School of Athens

I can’t say whether there are any aliens in the last two, because I have never come across (in popular culture) any looking like the things in above.

To summarize, my photo-editing adventure resulted aliens in four out of the eight Vinci paintings I tested, and zero out of four for Raphael. Visual reference point for aliens was based on how ‘obvious’ the symmetry looked like alien-forms, rather than one having to struggle to see them. This brings us back to the point I earlier mentioned regarding the unknown and the known.

One morning, carrying a heavy, imbalanced handbag on my shoulder and with my mother in tow, I spotted two turkeys strutting outside the Churchgate station.

The turkeys are no metaphor– they really were there, the turkeys. Outside the garbage strewn back-gate of Western Line’s last point, the birds, males I presume, walked proudly in the lane full of early morning commuters.

Then my mother displayed typical Mumbai behaviour. ‘Oh that’s ok, she said, ‘they are here usually in the morning and disappear by evening.’ I watched them chase a female. A female turkey, that is. The third bird was almost inside the Stadium restaurant. I wished it safety. ‘Let’s go. We may not get a cab till CST and then we’ll miss the train and then how will we ever reach Pune,’ she said, hoping to take my mind off what must be a regular sight for her. All this she poured before I could mumble ‘Shivneri.’

And what those birds did through the day, she must not have ever spared a thought to. She must see them every day, then perhaps hear some train announcement coming from the station nearby, realize the time or rather the shortage of it, and rush into the busy day. So, wondered the non-Mumbaikar me, what could these birds that weren’t seen so commonly even in the jungles of India, be doing on a busy Monday in the middle of a Mumbai road? A little shudder reminded me of the heavy handbag as I thought whether my mother saw the same birds every day.

They were not led by any human. Or a dog too. I decided to scan the restaurant menus of South Mumbai the next time I happened to be in one.

How magnificently they walked, pecking at bins occasionally. There was always this other angle, a slight chance, and Georgio Tsoukalos would agree– what if the underworld was actually rife with shape-shifters and unfriendly aliens? The turkeys did seem to know their way well. Too well. And they hypnotized the public enough to not get themselves into anybody’s conscious thought.

Imagine– three gangsta turkeys, plumes shining and stuff, boarding a local from Virar early morning. The crowd dispersing, respectfully and not in their senses, letting them get in before the train moved. The birds standing at the door through the journey with élan, cluck-clucking through some secret conversation. Maybe I should pay close attention to their clucks. It could be in Morse. Because it’s extremely funny, funny in ‘this chicken tastes funny’ way, to spot foreign birds strutting on the roads of Mumbai. Or maybe, I just didn’t pause enough, like others around me, to discover the reality.

Like this:

Dust motes swirled in the moonlight. Ruslan waited for the beasts- breath hushed, hand steady, camera ready. The wind echoed his stillness. Multiplying pairs of gleaming eyes popped in the dark bush, by the waterhole that rippled gently. Leaves shuffled above in the cluster of acacia. Hesitant, he looked up slowly. A luminescent disk shone through a gap in the still foliage.

Nothing.

The eyes were only inches away from Ruslan’s when he looked down. Blood-red on a mane-less, grey face. The scream dopplered off as he was sucked up, right into the luminescent disk.

Like this:

Arin poked his nose out from under the sheet and into the cutting air.

‘What if Mom finds us here?’

‘Shh. Don’t be so loud.’

‘Ok.’

The 7.00 PM news hadn’t illustrated the piece with the usual tacky animations. Inside their imaginative heads, the children had. Quite clearly, too. They never doubted what they saw. After all, it matched with the diagram in Di’s science textbook.

That winter night, a clear starry sky enveloped the three as they lay on the cold terrace floor with only a thin mat under and a thin sheet over. The most they could carry without grown-ups noticing; though Mom did say Kanaad looked plumper, perhaps a result of the excellent dinner she cooked.

A freezing hour later, the planets hadn’t showed up.

‘Look Di, Arin’s fallen asleep.’

The two shook the poor boy awake.

‘Did all the planets form one straight line like the picture in your book, Di?’ Groggy and knees tucked near his belly, Arin looked at his sister.

She was a pitiless eight-year old. ‘You missed it,’ she turned to face him. Beside her, Kanaad nodded with glee.

‘Oh.’ Arin was too sleepy to cry.

‘And you missed Di’s story about aliens,’ said Kanaad.

‘There really are… aliens?’

‘Yes. All around us. Invisible when they want to be. Shape-shifters. Transparent. Colourful. Plant-like. Moth-like. Sometimes,’ Di rubbed her eyes. ‘Human-like. Their ways are strange. You may keep talking to us, play with us and never ever know if Kanaad or I are one.’ Di’s eyes went oddly still in the scanty moonlight. Next door, Fluffy howled.

‘It’s cold here. I want to go to my room.’

‘No, Arin. Mom will hear you.’

‘No she’ll be snoring.’

‘Go, then. Don’t scream if you see an alien lurking around. When astronomical events like these happen, they often party on earth and get very, very hungry.’

Arin imagined grey-faced, spindly tall beings dancing on a bizarre Bollywood number he’d seen on MTV.

Kanaad gave a faint snore. Di ignored it. ‘And tonight, it must have been easy for them to zoom over here, as all the planets had arranged themselves in one line.’

‘I’ll stay here, then.’

A shooting star whizzed across.

Then another.

‘When will you two go back, Di?’

‘Just before the sun comes up. When Mom’s alarm rings, we’ll run down to our rooms, before she comes into the hall.’

‘You’ll really stay up till then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Di , you really saw all the planets in one row?’

‘Yes! Ask Kanaad.’

‘Saturn too?’

‘Yep.’

‘Will you wake me up if I fall asleep?’

‘Um.’

Much later in the freezing early hour, when the last bat had screeched and the first sparrow had chirped; Mom and Dad climbed up the stairs to watch the sunrise. Three small forms lay on the mat. Never had they seemed so alien and so dear to their mother as she watched them huddled and cuddled together. When the surprise wore off, she smiled, remembering the news.

Mom looked up at the orange sky, then reached down to gently run her hand through their hair and planted warmth on each cold cheek while Dad brought up some blankets.

“This is what we should do tomorrow,” said Girish with enthusiasm, “Leave early morning before all the other groups get up, take the river route and go visit the farms next to the riverbed. We can chat with the farmer’s family, probably milk their buffaloes, try our hand at the milk-churning equipment and Swappy and I can try ploughing the fields too..”

“And we can get fresh, amazing chai early morning!” I butted in.

“And the womenfolk won’t be bothered by anyone.” Sayantan said. Meha and Priyanka nodded in agreement.

‘Anyone’ were the teachers who accompanied us for the trip. Not that they bothered the village women, the women simply ran indoors whenever any of the ‘masterjees’ turned up to inspect if we were really working on our assignments. Insensitive behaviour from both sides in different contexts.

Environmental Perception (EP) is a two-week course in the foundation year of NID in which we visit a small village to study how it functions in micro and macro ‘systems design’ context. I was a bit of a dunce at that time to understand what this meant, but now I know what I should have actually done there other than drinking fresh buffalo milk herbal village tea and have khatta meetha churan from the toothless ancient shop-woman, with a few terrible sketches of goats, camels, cactii and handpumps thrown in here and there. I guess most of us considered it a week-long picnic before it started. A week later, after bathing in ice-cold water in the middle of february, living in a tribal village school where rats ran amok our dusty mattresses and refraining from much of normal behavioural tidbits (teachers called it PDA) we take for granted, I realized it was no picnic (specially after one girl woke the entire girls’ room at three a.m. one night when a rat ran on her blanketed self), but nevertheless a fun-filled (the rat returned a few more times) learning experience.

I have lived in my paternal aunt’s village for entire summers in the middle of water-thirsty Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Obviously, comparisons happened in my head and churned out some prejudices and pre-conceptions about Virampur*, the village we were to study. Some of them did turn out true; the place was water-starved, we rarely saw women’s faces during our stay, there were more goats than people and also thatch-roof huts with mud walls: a quintessential Indian village. Though most of our assignments involved making maps, studying the culture and local ‘design’ (in a very layered sense), they all involved direct interaction with the residents, be it the surly ‘thakur’ who sat at the entrance of his home (I was quite kicked to see that this fellow closely resembled the ones we see in films) the kids who chased chicks (Gallus Domesticus, not Homo sapiens sapiens), or the Ayurvedic doctor who had actually won a President’s award for his expertise.

What I couldn’t help ignore was the concept of a ‘nation,’ as we understand it from our ten years of NCERT textbooks spanning different subjects, did not seem to exist in the minds of most of the residents there. This might be a common fact in a lot of places in the world, but I had not come across it face-to-face before. In some of the rural places I have earlier visited, most people at least remotely referred to ‘India’ in some way or the other. In conversations (government this, government that..), in trying out ‘dishes’ like those South ‘Indians’, in (sadly) cracking jokes about Punjabis, and so on. They did display awareness of belonging to a certain-land-with-certain-customs. They seemed to know that a lot of people like them with different cultures exist around but who all come under on big umbrella of a common country. I think in reality, it doesn’t matter to anyone much beyond a point as long as their basic needs are taken care of, irrespective of whether they have a sense of belonging towards a country, state or culture. I guess generalization is a bad idea, but I still wonder.

Virampur people, particularly women, didn’t seem to be aware of the concept much. For instance, they referred to me as ‘Marathan,’ Sagarika Sundaram as ‘Madrasan’ and Priyanka Patel as ‘Gujratan’, but they thought that Marathis and Madrasis (a lot of north Indians still refer to anyone from the south of India as ‘Madrasis’, be they from any of the four states) are from two different countries. I first thought by ‘different countries’ they probably meant different states. I thought it was simply a use of different terminology, but they kept referring to Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu as ‘tumhara desh’ and Banaskatha district* as ‘hamara desh.’ We asked them about what all they knew about Bhaarat. They asked us whether Bhaarat was north or south of Virampur. They wondered if Bhaarat was Sayantan’s country. We tried the same question with ‘India’ and ‘Hindustan.’ All we got were indifferent shrugs.

All this while, ‘Bengali’ Sayantan sketched their many buffaloes merrily, probably wondering why his group mates were asking stupid questions to the village folk.